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CHRISTIAN DUTY. 



THREE DISCOURSES 



DELIVERED IN THS 



FIRST CONGREGATIONAL UNITARIAN CHURCH 



OF PHILADELPHIA 



MAY 28th, JUNE 4th AND JUNE Uth, 1854 



W. H. FURNESS 



WITH REFERENCE TO THE RECENT EXECUTION OF THE FUGI- 
TIVE SLAVE LAW IN BOSTON AND NEW YORK. 



PHILADELPHIA . 

AIERRIHEW & THOMPSON'S STEAM POWER PRESS, 

Merchant Street above Fourth, 

1854. 



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DISCOURSE. 



JOHN xxr. 15. 

'Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? He 

SAITH UNTO HIM, YeA, LoRD, THOU KNOWEST THAT I LOVE THEE. He SAITH 

UNTO HIM, Feed my lambs." 



A word upon the relation in which Peter stood at this 
time to Jesus. When Jesus was in the hands of the Priests, 
and suffering the most brutal treatment, Peter, who had 
followed the party that had arrested Jesus, and who, a 
little while before the arrest, had made the strongest pro- 
testations of fidelity to his master, alarmed at the violence 
that was beginning to be used, soon lost all courage, and 
became so terrified on his own account that, when he was 
suspected and accused of being a follower of Jesus, he de- 
nied that he had any knowledge of him, and this too with 
oaths and imprecations, calling God to witness the truth of 
his asseverations. Jesus heard the loud voice of his faithless 
friend disclaiming all acquaintance with him, but he said 
nothing. He only cast on Peter that look of mingled pity 
and reproach, which awoke in the bosom of the apostate 
disciple the agony of remorse, and caused him to go away 
from the place and weep bitterly ; that look, of which an 



eloquent English preacher has said that, « if it taught Peter 
to repent, it should teach us to believe," so expressive 
■was it of the divine humanity of Jesus; such a look as 
weeping angels cast upon weak and sinning men. In a 
few hours afterwards Jesus expired upon the cross, and the 
poor, broken-hearted Peter had it to remember that his last 
act towards his crucified friend was an act of the basest 
cowardice and treachery. But on the third day after the 
bloody tragedy, there came the startling rumor that Jesus 
was alive again, and had been seen by one and another of 
his friends, and had spoken with them. With what conflict- 
ing emotions, with what intense desire and with what 
shrinking and dread must the apostle have looked forward 
to meeting, eye to eye, the revered friend whom he had so 
shamefully disowned ! Our text is a part of the passage 
which relates an interview of Peter with Jesus, after the 
resurrection of the latter. 

My friends, this is an extraordinary, unprecedented fact, 
the re-appearance alive of the Crucified. But unprece- 
dented as it is, and whatever may be the difiiculties that cum- 
ber it, still I think no one who studies the account given 
of this interview of Jesus and Peter, can fail to be struck 
with the evidence, which it furnishes, of the identity of Jesus. 
That the person who re-appeared alive as Jesus was Jesus 
himself and no other, there can be no doubt. Every word 
is in wonderful keeping and character. Thrice had Peter, 
who before so abounded above all others in professions of 
devotion to his Master, thrice had he denied that he so much 
as knew him ! Surely, judging by any ordinary standard 
of human nature, we should justify Jesus in casting off his 



false friend forever, or, at least, in pronouncing upon him 
the severest condemnation. But Jesus was far above any- 
thing of this sort. In that generous and Godlike heart 
there was no thought of personal injury awakened, stinging 
him so much as to a look of anger. He knew his unhappy 
friend thoroughly. He knew his weakness, and no sense 
of personal insult blinded him to his love. In words of the 
tenderest consideration he seeks to put him on his guard. 
He makes no allusion to the past, except that as many 
times as Peter had denied him, so many times he repeats 
the question, with most impressive emphasis : " Lovest thou 
me ?" calling Peter by his whole name, " Simon, son of 
Jonas," thus concentrating the whole force of the question 
upon him and him alone, as if he had said, " Simon, I put 
it to you, you alone and no other, Do you love me ?" 

And then, how characteristic, how like Jesus it is that 
he did not demand, as an atonement for the past, any spe- 
cial personal homage from Peter. You know what a striking 
trait it was in Christ that he exacted no honor for himself, 
personally. On more than one occasion he expressly dis- 
claimed it. To the young man, who came kneeling down 
to him and addressing him with the title of " Good Master," 
he said, " Why callest thou me good ? there is none good 
but one — God." Again, when a woman once, in a crowd that 
gathered round him, expressed her admiration of him by 
pronouncing a blessing on her who had borne such a son, 
he declined the tribute, exclaiming, " Blessed rather are 
they Avho hear the word of God and keep it." Once, and 
again he declared that it was not by magnifying him per- 
sonally — it was not by crying Lord, Lord, that men would 



6 

be accepted, but by doing the will of our heavenly Father. 
Indeed, he would fain have sunk himself out of eight. " Of 
myself," he said, " I am nothing." "He that believeth in 
me believeth not in me, but in him who sent me." And 
this spirit prompting him to disclaim all personal honors, — 
I have no words to describe the power with which it breathes 
through that grand and awful account which he gives, of 
the time when the Son of Man will come in his glory, with 
all the holy angels with him, and will take his seat upon 
the throne of his glory, and all nations will be gathered 
before him. Then he represents himself as demanding no 
homage for himself personally, but as identifying himself 
with the poorest, the most despised of mankind, and as re- 
warding or punishing men as they have done good or neg- 
lected to do it to the least of his brethren. 

In the very same spirit, in our text, he bids Peter atone 
for his denial and prove his love — how ? by paying him 
divine honors ? No, his command is, " Feed my lambs." 
"Feed my sheep." This is all. The Good Shepherd, trans- 
fers the debt of homage due to him to his lambs. He came, 
himself with lamb-like gentleness, seeking not his own, not 
honor for himself, prepared rather to meet dishonor and 
death — he came to seek and save the family of man, the 
flock of God who were wandering far away from the fold, 
lost in horrid wildernesses, exposed to fall into fearful 
snares and pitfalls, and to be rent and torn by wild beasts. 
Men seemed to him, as he said, like sheep that had no shep- 
herfiiv. We all know who it was that especially had his 
heart, and, in whose service, he encountered the wrath of 
the honorable and the great, and sacrificed his life. It was 



the poor, the ignorant and the vicious, the neglected and 
despised, who had none to plead for them, who were. trod- 
den down from the cradle to the grave. These were his 
sheep, his lambs. And in commanding Peter to feed them, 
it is as if he had said : " You say that you love me ; doubt- 
less you believe what you say. But only in one way can 
you make it certain to me and to yourself that your pro- 
fession of love i^ not false and deceitful ; and that way is, 
by taking care of those who wander in the world like lambs 
among wolves. Feed them, although, in procuring suste- 
nance for them, you will be required like me to sacrifice 
yourself." 

And now, brothers, sisters, children, give me your hearts, 
listen with a good will to what I say. As Heaven is my 
witness I would not utter one word save for the dear love 
of Christ and of God, and the salvation of your own 
souls. Does it require any violent eflfort of the mind to 
suppose Christ to address to each one of us personally the 
same question that he put to Peter : " Lovest thou me ?" 
To such a question tvhat could we say in reply but " 0, 
thou holy and generous One, who didst suffer every indig- 
nity, and pour out thine innocent blood upon the cruel cross 
for Truth's sake and for man, we have basely denied thee 
many times. Yet thou knowest that we would love thee." 
To such a protestation on our part, can any one for a single 
moment imagine that he would answer, saying : "As you 
love me, acknowledge me as one with the Supreme God of 
the Universe, equal to him in power and glory, or as a 
super-angelic being, clothed with divine ofiBces, and claiming 
divine honors, or as a mysterious Atonement for the sins of 



8 

the world ?" Oh no, no. He would say to us as he said to 
Peter : Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep. 

At the hearing of this brief command, so simple, so direct, 
so unqualified, are we prompted like the teacher of the 
law, who, when Christ bade him love his neighbor as himself, 
asked, " And who is my neighbor," and in the parable of 
the Good Samaritan, received for answer that the Samaritan 
whom he despised, just as we despise the African, was his 
neighbor, — are we prompted in like manner to ask : « And 
who are the lambs, who are the sheep of Christ ?' Who are 
his lambs ! Who his sheep ! Behold that great multitude, 
more than three millions of men and feeble women and 
children, wandering on our soil, — no, not wandering, but 
chained down, not allowed to stir a step at their own free 
will, crushed and hunted, with all the power of one of the 
mightiest nations that the world has yet seen, wielded to 
keep them down in the depths of the deepest degradation 
into which human beings can be plunged. These, these, 
that we despise are our neighbors, the poor, stricken lambs 
of Christ. 

To cast one thought towards them may well cause us to 
bow down our heads in the very dust with shame. No 
wonder that, professing to love Christ and his religion, we 
do not like to hear them spoken of. For, so far from feeding 
the sheep of Christ, we are exerting the whole associated 
power of this land to keep them from being fed. < Feed 
my lambs.' We might feed them with fraternal sympathy, 
with hope, with freedom, the imperishable bread of Heaven. 
We might lead them into green pastures and by still waters, 
into the glorious liberty wherewith Christ died to make all 



9 

men free, the liberty of the children of God. We might 
secure to them the exercise of every sacred affection and 
faculty wherewith the Creator has endowed them. But we 
do none of those things. We suffer this great flock of the 
Lord Jesus to be treated as chattels, bought and sold, like 
beasts of burthen, hunted and lacerated by dogs and wolves. 
I say we, we of these Free Northern communities, because it 
is by our allowance, signified as effectually by our silence 
as by our active co-operation, that such things are. They 
could continue so scarcely an hour, were not the whole 
moral, religious and physical power of the North pledged 
to their support. Are we not in closest league and union 
with those who claim and use the right to buy and sell 
human beings, God's poor, the lambs of Christ, a Union 
which we imagine brings us in so much silver and gold as 
compensates for the sacrifice of our humanity and manhood? 
Nay, are we not under a law to do the base work of blood- 
hounds, hunting the panting fugitive of Freedom ? I utter 
no word of denunciation. There is no need. For facts 
that have occurred only within the last week transcend all 
denunciation. Only a few hours ago there was a man with 
his two sons hurried back into the inhuman bondage from 
which they had just escaped, and that man the brother, and 
those two sons, the nephews of a colored clergyman of New 
York, of such eminence in the New School Presbyterian 
Church that he has received the honors of a European 
University, and has acted as moderator in one of the Pres- 
byteries of the same church when held in the city where 
he resides. Almost at the very moment the poor fugitive 
v/ifch his children was dragged through our city, the General 



10 

Assembly of that very branch of the Presbyterian Church, 
now in session here, after discussing for days the validity 
of Roman Catholic baptism, threw out as inexpedient to be 
discussed the subject of that great Wrong which was flinging 
back into the agony of slavery a brother of one of their 
own ordained ministers, and could not so much as breathe 
a word of condemnation against the false and cruel deed 
which has just been consummated at the Capitol of the 
nation. 

When such facts are transpiring in our midst, we cannot 
be guiltless concerning the lambs of Christ. It is we, we 
who make up the public opinion of the North, we who con- 
sent that these Free States shall be the hunting ground 
where these our poor brothers and sisters are the game ; it is 
we that withhold from them the bread of life, the inalienable 
rights of man. As we withhold these blessings, so is it in 
our power to bestow them. The sheep then that Christ' 
commands us, as we love him, to feed, are those who are 
famishing for the lack of the food which it is in our power 
to supply. And we can help to feed and relieve and liberate 
them by giving our hearty sympathy to the blessed cause of 
their Emancipation, to the Abolition of the crying Injustice 
with which they are treated, by uttering our earnest protest 
against the increasing and flagrant outrages of the oppressor, 
by withholding all aid and countenance from the work of 
oppression. 

We have no need to lift a finger in the way of violence, 
or to stain the cause of the slave, which is the cause of 
Christ himself, with a single drop of human blood. There 
is a passive resistance which is invincible. When every 



11 

member of a community is animated by such a fervent love 
of justice and freedom that he is prepared to suffer and die 
for them, but never to inflict suffering or death, in such a 
community inhuman laws will find none to execute them, 
and the officials of Government would sooner throw up their 
offices than carry out such enactments. No man theiy^ 
would dare to brave a united and determined public f)pinion. 
To such a public opinion every man and every woman may 
contribute, using no force but the force of persuasion and 
truth, abjuring all weapons save such as appeal to reason 
and conscience, knowing no timidity, no lukewarmness, no 
fear, standing faithfully up in the face of every danger for 
humanity, for justice, for liberty for all. Thus serving the 
cause of the weak and the oppressed, we may obey the com- 
mand of Christ, " Feed my sheep." 

While I thus counsel you, as you profess to love the Lord 
Jesus, thus to do his bidding by a determined but pacific 
opposition to the cruelty and wrong which are inflicted on 
those for whom he died, there come to us tidings of violence 
and bloodshed in a northern city, in an uproar of excite- 
ment, as it well may be, at the violation of its soil. I grieve 
to think that a drop of blood has been shed, but if blood 
must flow, I would rather a thousand times that it should be 
the blood of the friends of the slave than of his oppressors. 
But while it is sorrowful that any blood should be shed, it 
is no wonder that a law which would disgrace the most 
despotic government that ever existed, a law, which, in 
trampling on the weak, strikes a blow at all human rights, 
should meet with bloody resistance on that spot where the 
flame of American Liberty first burst forth, under the 



12 

shadow of that hill which was drenched with the blood of 
the hardy fathers of New England. It is no wonder that 
that flame should again break out when the Slave power 
again attempts to defile that sacred soil by dragging away 
from it the fugitive for Freedom. No wonder that the capital 
of Massachusetts (God save the dear old Commonwealth 
and malce her the defender of liberty on this soil, for if she 
fails, I know not where else on earth we shall look,) should 
be in a blaze of excitement at such a juncture, when the 
plighted faith of the South, kept for thirty years, has been 
so basely broken, and territory, expressly guarantied to 
Freedom, has been ruthlessly torn from her, as if Slavery 
had an equal right there or anywhere on the face of God's 
earth. The fruits of the Nebraska iniquity are ripening 
very fast. We are as yet witnessing only the beginning of 
the consequences which are to follow that outrage upon 
Liberty. I cannot pray that the excitement may subside 
while its cause remains ; rather may it grow day by day, 
hour by hour ; but I do pray that we may be spared the 
effusion of human blood. But if blood must be shed, let it 
not be shed by those who are struggling for the Hight, 
rather may their own flow freely to the last drop ! 

But to return. "As you love me," saith Jesus, "feed 
my lambs." Such is obviously the test of our reverence for 
Christ : sympathy for the weak and the injured, for those 
especially with whom it is hazardous to sympathize, whose 
cause we espouse only to incur obloquy and loss. If we do 
not feel for them, feel deeply, so deeply as to be interested, 
actively interested in their behalf, eager, not only willing, 
but eager to aid them, to swell the tide of sympathy with 



13 

them, if not ourselves to plead their causa, yet interested 
always in hearing their cause pleaded by others — if, I say 
we do not feel thus acutely for them, our love of Christ, our 
Christian profession is a mere pretence. It can have no 
acceptance before God, no respect among men. Many 
there are who do not feel for the lambs of Christ, who 
are perfectly indiiferent to their wrongs, who care not 
though they be ravaged and slaughtered all the day long, 
and who are free to acknowledge that they do not and 
cannot feel for them. What ! can you not feel for your 
own flesh, for beings made in all points as you are, with 
like sensibilities to pleasure and pain, with like affections, 
like sorrows and joys, like ties, social and domestic ? Then 
do not pretend to feel with and for Christ himself. But, 
friends, your hearts are not so hard and cold, you are not 
so devoid of the common instincts and sympathies of human 
nature as you would make it appear. You are not stocks 
and stones. You cannot look on the agonies of a dumb 
animal without pain. And if you are unmoved by the 
thought of suffering men, women, and children, it is because 
that thought has not yet been brought vividly before you, it 
is because you have not seen these suffering lambs of Christ. 
Had you seen them, had you seen, as some of us have seen 
not long ago, a poor mother fleeing from the bondage in 
which one after another of her numerous children had been 
sold and carried far away into hopeless slavery, I am sure 
you would have vowed in your inmost souls never again to 
forget the commands of your Lord and Saviour, never again 
to be heedless of his poor lambs. 

But at all events, unless we feel for those whom he felt 



14 

for, we cannot really love him. Nothing is clearer to my 
mind than that it is only through sympathy with them that 
we can have any appreciation of him. That in him which 
commands our faith, our reverence, our affection is his hu- 
manity, that interest in men which was so strong in him 
that he sacrificed everything for it. This, his humane and 
generous spirit, this it is that renders him so beautiful, so 
loveable, so great. It is for this that we revere and love 
him when we love him truly. His self-renouncing love in- 
spires our love. Let it be that his nature was divine, 
super-angelic, something different and above our common 
human nature, nevertheless, it is not for anything peculiar 
in his nature that he is reverenced. His generous spirit is 
what we love him for. 

But we cannot love that spirit, we can have no idea of 
it, any more than a man born blind can have of colors, 
unless we are first conscious of some measure of it in our- 
selves. Only through a kindred spirit in ourselves can we 
enter into the spirit of Christ, and know of a certainty how 
beautiful it is, and how divine. The more fully we become 
imbued with the same spirit, the more thoroughly do we 
know him. He bids us, therefore, feed his lambs, that, by 
so doing, we may learn to love him. Only by obeying his 
commands can we bring him close to us and have him dwell 
in us, the object of our reverent and devoted affection. 
True enough it is that if we love him we shall do as he did. 
But the reverse of this proposition is also true. If we do 
like him, who, like a true shepherd, gave his life for the 
sheep, we shall discern a greatness and beauty in his cha- 
racter, to be discerned in no other way. We are prone to 



15 

place great reliance on grand descriptions of him. "We 
magnify him with all sorts of consecrated phrases, but they 
amount to nothing. They do not bring us nearer to him* 
or him nearer to us. Only his spirit in us can interpret 
his life for us and reveal to us its transcendant beauty. And 
his spirit, — all the relations of life, the circle of home and 
kindred, our social ties, all furnish us with opportunities 
for the cultivation of that. 

Above all, the lambs of Jesus, his harassed and hunted 
flock, driven down into dark depths by the wolves of Oppres- 
sion, these all, appealing to us for our pity, for our help, in- 
vite us to become partakers of his spirit, and so enter into a 
knowledge and love of Him in whom are hid treasures of 
wisdom, sanctification, and redemption. how are we ad- 
jured, at this present momentous crisis, when cruel Wrong 
has taken another gigantic stride, when the virgin territory 
of the great West has been thrown open to the pollution of 
Slavery, when the prospect is black with disastrous portents 
to the cause of Humanity, when we are threatened with war 
for the sake of the accursed traffic in human flesh, — how are 
we adjured, not merely for the sake of our country, already 
become the abode of a most ruthless despotism, not 
merely for the sake of unborn generations, but for the love 
of Him whom we so clamorously profess to honor and love — 
how solemnly are we entreated to look our condition in the 
face, to pause before it is too late, to withdraw ourselves 
from this monstrous conspiracy against the poor outcasts 
of Africa, in a word, to obey the command of Christ, and 
feed his lambs. He has declared our duty to them para- 
mount to all other considerations. And in beseeching you 



16 

to turn your hearts to their great wretchedness, remember, 
I express no mere personal feeling. It is not I, it is Truth, 
it is Christ who died for us, it is God the great Father of 
us all, who, through the instincts of our common humanity, 
calls upon us to cherish and protect and feed the poor, to 
do unto the least as we would do unto the greatest, to pray 
and labor for the most abject slave as if we beheld in him 
the Son of God himself. 



DISCOUESE. 



LUKE XIV. 33. 



" Whosoever he be of 'you that forsaketh not all that he hath, 

HE cannot be my DISCIPLB." 

If there is any one thing more prominent than another 
in the life and teachings of Him whose sacred and immor- 
tal memory we profess to honor, it is the sympathy he felt 
for suffering men, the poor and the ignorant, whom the 
rich and the powerful left heavy laden and uncared for. 
To these, to teach, to comfort and to bless them, he gave 
his life. He made their case his own. He put himself in 
their place. He condemned in the strongest language those 
who oppressed and neglected them. His rule was — the 
rule which he laid down in so many words, and of which 
his life to the very last breath was an illustration — that we 
should do to others as we would they should do to us. Our 
neighbor, whom, as he taught, we are to serve as we serve 
ourselves, is the suffering man whose sufferings we may re- 
lieve, whose wrongs we may right, whose rights we may 
vindicate, even though he be one of a people whom we have 
been brought up to despise as the Jews despised the Sama- 
ritans. 

But why need I go on in this strain ? It is written on 
every page of the New Testament that Christ taught first 

2 



18 

of all, that he inculcated again and again, and in the most 
explicit language possible, as the most religious, most sa- 
cred of duties, the duty of sympathy with our suffering 
fellow man. I know nothing about Christianity, the reli- 
gion which brings us statedly together in this place, I know 
not my right hand from my left, I do not know light from 
darkness, if it is not as plain as noonday, that what Christ 
requires of his friends is humanity, a humanity which is 
ready to meet any peril, to the loss of life itself, in the dis- 
charge of the simple oflBces to which it prompts. I look in vain 
for any word of his that limits or qualifies the obligation of 
this first Christian duty by any worldly or political conside- 
rations whatever. I cannot find that he has anywhere 
taught that the fear of giving offence or of creating political 
disturbance is to deter his disciples from, helping others as 
they would wish, under a change of circumstances, to be 
helped themselves ; or from asserting that blessed truth, 
namely, that there is one God, the Father of all, and that 
all men are brethren ; that truth, which is to make all men 
happy and free. On the contrary, the very first time, as 
his history informs us, that he spoke in the Synagogue, or 
Jewish church, on the Sabbath day in the town where he 
was brought up, his hearers were so enraged at his saying, 
and quoting Scripture to show, that Gentiles had sometimes 
been favored by God more than Jews,* (a saying as offensive 
to Jewish ears as it is now to Christian ears to declare in 
church that colored people have equal rights with white,) 
that the meeting was broken up in disorder, and he himself 

• How shockingly profane must it have sounded to the Jews to hear 
the Scriptures quoted for such a purpose ; the Scriptures, which on every 
page declare Israel to be the Chosen of God ! 



19 

barely escaped with his life. Such was the beginning of his 
public course, and its end — how was that ? As all the world 
knows, he was seized in the dead of night and dragged awaj 
before the Roman magistrate on the charge of being a danger- 
ous meddler with politics, of having been round everywhere 
in Galilee stirring up the people, putting in danger the peace 
of the nation, disturbing the civil order of things, and all 
from political motives, with the design to make himself 
a king. And from first to last, did these things move him 
a single hair ? Self-possessed and serene as the morning 
light, in that God-like freedom from all fear which employs 
no weapon but truth, and uses no shield but the breastplate 
of a just and humane purpose, he kept steadily on his way, 
regardless of the storm of wrath and misrepresentation 
which beat upon him ; and when he could do no more, and 
no other way to express his love of man was left him, he 
poured out his blood upon the terrible cross, with words of 
love for his mother, of forgiveness for his executioners, and ' 
of trust in God. Oh friends, we profess to commemorate 
the death of Christ, but have we ever penetrated to the 
heart of that fact ? Had we any portion of his spirit, of 
the divine humanity which animated him, we should behold 
there such a manifestation of the beauty and majesty of 
God, as no outward vision could afford ; no, not even though 
the heavens were rent in twain from north to south, and 
the multitudinous host of heaven's angels were revealed to 
sight. 

But although it is perfectly plain to us, here and now, 
that Christ had no political design, but a purely benevolent 
and religious one, it was not so plain in his day, and to 



20 

those whose subsistence and wealth depended upon the 
maintenance of that order of things then existing, which it 
was the effect and tendency of his truth to disturb. They 
were for keeping everything just as it was. Their interests 
were vested in the established institutions of the times. It 
would not do, it endangered their comfort and ease, to have 
even so much as the decorum of the Sabbath day broken in 
upon by the instantaneous cure of a poor sick woman. It 
caused a great commotion, the gathering of a great crowd, 
and the timid and the selfish were alarmed, and did not 
know what was going to happen next. And besides, they 
who had kept the people down, imposing heavy burthens 
on them, burthens of superstition and ceremonial observance, 
were they not startled, think you, when they saw how the 
people were excited at the presence of Jesus, when they 
heard what he said about them ? He paid them no deference. 
He never had asked leave of them to do as he was doing. 
They could not understand him. They judged him by 
themselves. Strangers to the spirit that moved him, they 
were satisfied that he was prompted by selfish and ambitious 
motives. They saw in him not a particle of religion or 
humanity. They had no eyes to see it with. And when 
occasionally they were brought face to face with him and 
the power and goodness of his acts could not be questioned, 
and it was plain he was no impostor, then they said he was 
crazy, that he had a devil, that Beelzebub, the very prince 
of all the devils, befriended him. 

He foresaw, he could not but foresee all this opposition 
and obloquv. He accepted it all as a part of his lot, as 
the burthen he must bear, that his good should be evil 
spoken of and his light denounced as darkness. He fore- 



21 

warned his friends that they must expect like treatment^ 
and be excommunicated in like manner. And, accordingly, 
after his disappearance, they were arrested as disorderly 
persons and carried before the authorities, and forbidden 
so much as to breathe his name in public ; and they an, 
swered, "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken 
unto you more than unto God, judge ye ; for we cannot but 
speak the things which we have seen and heard." They 
were denounced as men who were for turning the world 
upside down. 

And those who came after the apostles, the Christians of 
the primitive ages, were exposed to the like charges. The 
Roman government was in matters of religion remarkably 
tolerant. They recognised the gods of all nations. When 
they conquered any strange people they received and adop- 
ted the idols that the conquered tribe worshipped, and set up 
their images in Rome. But then, occasionally, they had a 
custom of setting up an image of one of their own gods, or 
of the reigning Emperor, and requiring, as an act of alle- 
giance to the State, that every subject of the empire, what- 
ever might be his religion, should render it divine honors. 
They virtually said to the people, "You may have your own 
religion and worship your own gods as much as you please, 
but you must respect ours also. You must do reverence to 
this image of Augustus or Tiberius, of Nero or Trajan, or of 
whomsoever the Emperor might be. It is the decree of the 
Senate. It is a law of the government. And the laws 
must be obeyed until they are repealed. Your scruples of 
humanity, or religion, or conscience, or whatever you call 
them, cannot be considered. It would be treason to the 
State, rebellion against the government. So take the 



09 

censer and worship this idol." Many timid and well meaning 
Christians, I have no doubt, yielded and outwardly con- 
formed for fear of the penalty, contrary to their own 
convictions. But many, very many, women as well as men, 
bravely refused and suffered martyrdom, and have been 
canonised in the hearts of millions of men, and have filled 
the world with beautiful and touching legends. Their refusal 
to obey the commands of the Government was accounted 
so insolent, such an interference with the political arrange- 
ments of the State, as deserved the severest punishment. 

And so it has always been from those early days to 
the present. There is no human government that has 
ever existed that has not interfered with the discharge of 
Christian duty. How it stands with us here and now in 
this enlightened age, in this country which makes so loud 
a boast of its religious liberties, the events of the past week 
do most painfully admonish us. Were the laws to interfere 
with our religious forms, with the privileges of public 
worship which we are here enjoying ; were a file of soldiers 
to enter our churches with fixed bayonets and command 
us to disperse, because we were not worshipping ac- 
cording to law, who would think of charging us with 
interfering with politics, going out of the sphere of 
religion, when we protested against and resisted such an 
outrage, as every man of us would ? But when the hand of 
unlawful power, under the form of law, is laid upon our 
very hearts, suppressing the instincts of our common 
humanity, and we are forbidden to do what Christ has 
commanded, what child among us can fail to see where the 
charge of intermeddling and interference lies ? Who does 
not see how false to Humanity and to Christ the churches of 



23 

Christ throughout New England must be this day, if they 
do not cry aloud in remonstrance and condemnation of the 
wrong which in defiance of the plainest teachings of Christ 
has been perpetrated upon our poor brother on the soil 
with which the dust of our Puritan fathers has mingled. 

But, my friends, I have no heart now to dwell on the 
painful and humbling scenes of the past week, although they 
will not away. It is the old trial come up again, the trial 
which has been laid upon the disciples of Christ again and 
again, from his day to the present, and which they may 
shrink from but cannot escape. It is the old conflict be- 
tween the spirit of Christ, which is a spirit of unwearied, 
all-embracing, self-sacrificing Humanity, and the spirit of 
the world embodied in the world's laws, practices, and insti- 
tutions, and which is a spirit of selfish and inhuman power, 
aiming only to perpetuate itself at the sacrifice of the 
weak and the despised. In the providence of God we are 
involved in this conflict, and our first concern is, is it not ? 
to be true to our profession as followers of Jesus, true to 
the faith, the reverence and the love with which we regard 
him? 

For our own guidance now, let us give earnest heed to 
these words of his : "Whoever he be of you that forsaketh 
not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple ;" and again : 
" Whoever doth not bear his cross and come after me, can- 
not be my disciple." You desire, in every trial to which 
you are subjected, to bear yourself as his disciple, to do as 
he has commanded- If you are brought into collision with 
human laws which are in direct opposition to his precepts, 
if, right before your eyes, a poor brother or sister is op- 
pressed and wronged, you would discharge the oflBce of a 



24 

Christian disciple, you would act as becomes a friend of 
Jesus. This is all that you have to do. Do this, and you 
will do all that you should, and if the oppressed one is not 
liberated and the wrong righted, the fault rests not on you. 
But you cannot do this ; you cannot act the part of a 
Christian disciple merely because you wish to do so. There 
is a certain disposition of mind that is of indispensable 
importance, and without which all your efforts and prayers, 
though you agonize day and night, are of no avail. And 
that temper of mind, that disposition, is indicated in our 
text : " WTiosoever he he of you that forsaheth not all that he 
hath" You must hold all that you have and enjoy of the 
good things of this life, ease, the good-will and affection 
of friends and life itself — you must hold them all, pre- 
pared to renounce them all instantly and without reser- 
vation, for the sake of obedience to the dictates of hu- 
manity, the command of Christ. 

Some will have it that, in order to do our Christian 
duty to an injured brother, we must be prepared to 
inflict suffering and wounds, to shoot, and stab, and 
shed fraternal blood, and, being so prepared, to attack 
and destroy his injurers. But Jesus never did so. He 
never taught so. He was led as a lamb to the slaugh- 
ter, and as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so he 
opened not his mouth, or when he spake, he spake not to 
revile and exasperate, but only to utter fearlessly the soul- 
subduing words of Truth and Mercy. He nowhere commands, 
he forbids, his disciples to fight; and when, on one occasion, 
one of them drew a sword in his defence, his words were, 
" put up the sword in its sheath, for all they that use the 
sword will perish by the sword." Force stirs up force in 



25 

return. Shed the blood of the injurious, and then sympa- 
thy is transferred to them, and the cause of the injured is 
weakened, and you have lost power. If violence is used 
in behalf of the oppressed, it has no authority from the 
example and precepts of Christ. He overcame by giving 
up to his enemies all that they could take, all that it 
was in their power to overcome. They could not reach his 
soul, they could only lacerate and destroy his body. The 
spirit within bim, as his blood flowed and his flesh was torn, 
grew more radiant in truth, more beautiful in love, more 
mighty in power. So bright, so beautiful, so mighty, that 
the grim and bloody cross partook of its beauty and power, 
and now shines over the whole earth like an unfading star, 
and nations prostrate themselves before it as their most 
sacred symbol. But, be it well considered, the sub- 
mission which he taught and exemplified is not a tame 
acquiescence, it is not silence, it is not inaction. It im- 
plies and it manifests the utmost fearlessness. It is the 
highest form of courage. It is the very soul of power. It is 
the temper that speaks the truth boldly, defying the utmost 
violence of falsehood and wrong. It is the brave spirit that 
goes unharmed amid raging hate and malice, and gleaming 
swords and bristling bayonets, strong and calm in the con- 
ciousness of a true and benevolent purpose, and keeps back 
not one syllable of truth, though it should be the last that 
it utters. It knows no extravagance, no threatening, no 
boasting. It knows both how to speak and it knows how 
to be silent. It does not undertake to tell what it will do 
or will not do, but when the moment comes it does what 
the moment needs. 

I am not saying that such a temper must be instantane- 



26 

ously irresistible. It may not gain the victory on the 
spot, but it gains a more glorious and enduring victory in 
the end, while the immediate triumph of its opposers is the 
pledge and seal of their final defeat ; their victory is their 
defeat. 

So it was in the case of Christ himself. I state only an 
historical fact. When his enemies had hung him on the 
cross, they flattered themselves they had put a full end to 
his religion, but from his cross there came forth a power 
which outlives the empire of Rome. 

And it stands written in the pages of the human heart that 
it should be so. Nothing so fascinates mankind as Courage. 
And which is the greater courage, that which inspires a 
man cased in steel and armed to the teeth, or that which 
prompts him to go unarmed into the midst of mortal dan- 
ger ? The brute courage of the soldier is seen and ad- 
mired at a glance, but Christian courage cannot be so 
readily seen and appreciated. The false standard of valor 
by which the world has so long been governed, has unfitted 
us to discern the glory of the Christian warrior. I am 
fully persuaded that whatever of true courage was mani- 
fested amid the trying scenes of last week has not been 
without its effect. The few brave, unarmed men who spoke 
and labored for humanity and justice, have, in their Chris- 
tian bearing, laid the foundations of a personal influence 
which will hereafter tell with commanding effect in that 
exasperated community. Hitherto, they have been the 
objects of unmitigated ridicule and abuse, but already un- 
j equivocal signs have appeared that they are destined to 

Q reign with a power in the hearts their fellow citizens, which 



27 

our political leaders, though clad all over in official dignity, 
may envy, but never reach. 

While we have thus had some instructive hint of the 
power of true courage, the courage that confronts violence 
but refrains from using it, we have had an illustration of 
the effect of violence which must not be lost on us. If the 
blood that was shed. had been shed on the other side, had 
it been the blood of an unarmed friend of the fugitive, the 
fugitive would have been rescued, but it would have been 
at a terrible cost of human life ; for the sight of such inno- 
cent blood would have roused into uncontrollable madness 
that demoniac element, before which the power of the will 
vanishes, and which slumbers in us all, in the feeblest wo- 
man. But as it was, that one life, much as it is on all 
accounts to be deplored, has saved we know not how many 
lives. It prevented also the rescue of the victim of despotic 
power. It checked the rising tide of popular feeling. It 
cooled the general heat. But remember, my hearers, there 
is a higher and more precious end than the rescue of one 
or of a thousand fugitives, and that- is, the growth and 
increase of the humanity and valor of the Christian disci- 
ple, the revival of the spirit of Christ in the world, at once 
peaceful and fearless, lifting up and protecting the least of 
our brethren, and yet braving principalities and powers, 
ministering to the hunted fugitive slave, and rebuking 
wickedness in high places, undaunted by the formalities of 
human authority ; the spirit that is ready to relinquish all 
things, that carries its cross as if doomed to death, pre- 
pared to die rather than prove false to humanity and God. 
This is what the world needs, for this only can bring true 



28 

freedom and peace. I would not have a single slave liber- 
ated, a single fugitive rescued, save through the agency of 
this Christian temper. Let us labor and pray for this. 
What though violent and semi-barbarous men brandish 
their weapons and pollute God's pure air with their pro- 
fane revilings and threats, why should such things exas- 
perate us, or tempt us to become like them ? Why should 
we feel as if it were possible for them to insult us ? Rather 
let us be true to the Gospel of justice and love, and, for 
the sake of that, bare our breasts to the arm of violence. 
So and so only, can the final victory be ours and ours forever. 
So may we disarm the violent not only of their weapons, 
but of their violence, and our triumph shall be even theirs 
also. Our individual work in the world is not to liberate 
nations, but, as we have opportunity, to grow in the grace 
of the Lord Jesus, to become more and more like him, to be 
faithful and true, all human laws and examples to the con- 
trary notwithstanding. We would be friends with Christ. 
This we cannot be unless we are ready to renounce all that 
we have, all that m^n can take from us. Having this mind 
we shall have strength to do and endure all that may be 
required of us for the deliverance of a suffering world. 
Cherishing this mind, we shall gain all things, though we 
lose all things. We must keep our own souls fin this self- 
sacrificing spirit at every hazard, for this is more to us 
than all governments, unions, and constitutions. He that 
saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loses it for the sake 
of Justice and Humanity, shall save it unto life eternal. 
I suppose these truths seem to you now extravagant and 
overstrained, but occasions may come, and very soon, at a 



29 



moment -when "we think not, as the signs of the times 
admonish us, when they will be found to have a world of 
meaning which no words can express. 

In the meanwhile, what comfort, what support, what 
inspiration is at hand in the noble and godlike idea of 
Jesus! We may rise in thought to the contemplation of him 
and associate ourselves with him as his friends, weak, fail- 
ing often, but still hungering and thirsting to be his faith- 
ful friends, united to him by a kindred spirit ; and not his 
friends alone, but the friends of the good and great, the patri- 
ots and saints, who have languished in dungeons and perished 
on scaffolds, or by the hands of frantic and misguided mobs 
the sacramental host of God's elect, the noble company of 
the apostles and martyrs, who, having gone throuo-h much 
tribulation, weeping, bleeding, dying, ridiculed, tormented, 
cast out, do now reign in the deathless kingdom of the 
human heart, w^earing crowns of unfading glory, and bear- 
ing palms of peace and of victory, friends of these, friends 
of God, the Universal Father, partaking of his nature 
entering into his everlasting and unutterable joy. 



DISCOURSE. 



JOHN XIII. 17. 
"If ye know these things, happy ark yk if ye do them.*" 

It would seem, at first sight, as if it were only necessary 
that men should know the things they are hound to do, in 
order to do them. Accordingly, there is hardly anything 
about which the world is more busy, and for which so many 
costly institutions exist, and so many associations are in ac- 
tive operation, as the communicating of knowledge, the know- 
ledge of truth and duty. The great prevailing idea seems to 
be, only let men know what is right to be done and they will 
do it. And we persist in this belief, and in all the varied ac- 
tivity to which it prompts, blind to the fact that there is all 
the diiference in the world between knowing the right and 
doing it. The vast mechanism for the production of knowledge 
goes grinding on without weariness or intermission ; church 
bells ring, thousands of voices speak, the Press works day 
and night, and printed paper is showered over the globe in 
quantities sufficient to cover its surface feet deep, and 
knowledge is produced in unmeasured abundance, but the 
virtue, the doing, which, it is so confidently believed, is to 
follow the knowing as the immediate and inseparable conse- 



32 

quence, is by no means forthcoming. Men continue pretty 
much as barbarian and selfish, the slaves of depraving ap- 
petites, as if they were wholly ignorant of the things re- 
lating to virtue and to duty. Still they plunge into vices 
that destroy both body and soul. They corrupt, they de- 
fraud, they hunt, they buy and sell one another. They 
wrangle and fight and kill, and give themselves unbounded 
license, until, under some obvious aspects, it would seem to 
be a world of devils that we are living in. And all this is 
going on under the blazing sun of Christian knowledge, 
whose noonday light discloses all the guilt and misery of 
these vicious courses, all the ruin of intemperance, all the 
shame of licentiousness, all the sufi"ering that comes from 
hatred, oppression and violence, all the peace and power of 
a pure heart and a self-restraining will, all the honor and 
happiness of being humane and just. All these things, good 
and evil, are known. Men know well enough what is right, 
what is true. They know that they are bound by every 
consideration for life and health to restrain themselves. 
They know that they are bound by the very constitution of 
their nature to do unto others as they would that others 
should do unto them. They know all these things, but 
happy, happy would they be if they would only do them. 
Doing, — what a very different thing is it from knowing ! 

Now, the question arises, and it is a question which it is 
worth our while to consider with all the attention we can 
command : Why is it a different thing ? What makes this 
difference between knowing and doing? Why is it that 
there is such a great gap between our knowledge and our 
practice ? 



33 

The simple trutli is, that, while man has a faculty of dis- 
cerning, of knowing, in other words, while he is a rational, 
intelligent being, this is not, by any means, all that ho is. 
He is something else, and quite distinct. He is a creature 
of intelligence, it is true, and he is also a creature of in- 
stincts, impulses, passions, a creature of sympathy, of imi- 
tation, of habit. He is made up of appetites and desires 
which stimulate him to action antecedently to the develop- 
ment and exercise of his knowing and reasoning powers ; 
desires, which seek nothing on earth but their own gratifi- 
cation, without regard to the conclusions of his reason and 
natural sense of right and wrong ; desires, which are in- 
flamed by indulgence and made well nigh irresistible by 
habit, and which are continually driving him onward in the 
face of reason and conscience, and which, oftentimes, even 
a most bitter experience has no power to check. No man 
knows better — no man knows as well as the slave of intem- 
perance what a full fountain of suffering and anguish in- 
temperance is. He who yields himself to the lust of sensual 
pleasure, sees the loathsome death's head under her false 
and gaudy adornments ; but what avails the sight to keep 
him from that embrace which strikes death into his soul ? 

And they who ill-treat and tread down their brethren 
and sisters, trampling upon the sacred image of the 
invisible God stamped upon every human being, and they 
who hunt the poor bleeding lambs of the great Shep- 
herd, or stand by and permit them to be hunted down and 
kept in most pitiable bondage, with no determined remon- 
strance on their part, they know perfectly well how un- 
christian, how inhuman all this is in the great eye of God. 

3 

t«rc. 



34 

We confess that we know it — confess, do I say ? We earn- 
estly avow — we actually make a boast of our knowledge. 
We say that no man need tell us anything about it, that 
we see the iniquity of oppressing human beings and treating 
them as brutes as plainly as it can be seen, that we feel it 
all as deeply as any one can feel it, that it is idle to talk 
to us, as if we were not as earnestly opposed to Slavery as 
any one can be. Again and again I have had it said to me, 
with apparently the most perfect simplicity, " Why do you 
keep saying so much about the slaves ? Do you imagine 
that there is one among your hearers who does not agree 
with you ? We all know that Slavery is very wrong. What 
is the use of harping upon this subject Sunday after Sun- 
day ? We all feel about it just as you do." " Feel about it 
just as I do." Very likely, my friends. It is very possible 
that you all feel as much, and that many of you feel 
about it more than I do. God knows that my regret always 
has been not that I feel so much, but that I do not feel 
more. Would to heaven that neither you nor I could eat 
or sleep for pity, pity for our poor down-trodden brothers 
and sisters. But the thing to which I implore your atten- 
tion now is, not what we know and feel, but the delusion 
which we are under in confounding knowing with doing, in 
fancying that we are working to abolish Slavery because 
we know that it is wrong. This is what I would have you 
now to consider, the deception that we practise on ourselves, 
the dangerous error into which we fall, when we pass off the 
knowledge of our duty for the performance of it. These are 
two very distinct things. If you know what is right, happy 
are ye if ye do it. 



35 

Observe, my friends, what it is to wliich I am now en- 
treating your consideration. It is not the wrongs or the 
rights of the oppressed upon which I am now discoursing. 
It is our own personal exposure to a most serious mistake. 
It is a danger, which threatens our own souls, to which I 
would that our eyes should be open and on the watch. 

And here, by the way, let me say that one great reason 
why I refer as often as I do to that great topic of the day 
which in one shape or another is continually shaking the 
land and marking the age in which we live, is not merely 
the righting of the wronged, but the instruction, the moral 
enlightenment, the religious edification of our own hearts, 
which this momentous topic affords. To me this subject in- 
volves infinitely more than a mere question of Humanity. 
Its political bearing is the very least and most superficial 
part of it, scarcely worth noticing in comparison with its 
moral and religious relations. Once, deterred by its outside, 
political aspect, I shunned it as many do still, but the more 
it has pressed itself on my attention, the more I have con- 
sidered it, — the more and more manifest has it become to 
me that it is a subject full of light and of guidance, of 
warning and inspiration for the individual soul. It is 
the most powerful means of grace and salvation appointed 
in the providence of Heaven, for the present day and genera- 
tion, more religious than churches and Sabbaths. It is full 
of sermons. It is a perfect gospel, a whole Bible of mind- 
enlightening, heart-cleansing, soul-saving truth. How much 
light has it thrown for me on the page of the New Testa- 
ment ! What a profound significance has it disclosed in the 
precepts and parables of Jesus Christ ! How do his words 



36 

burst out with a new meaning ! How does it help us to appre- 
ciate his trials, and the godlike spirit with which he bore them. 
Indeed, I perceive a most impressive and admonishing 
resemblance between this subject which is moving all minds 
and growing into such gigantic proportions and the Death 
of Christ himself. When Jesus had expired on the cross, 
how little did the Greek and Roman world dream that the 
crucifixion of an obscure Jew, condemned to death in a 
remote province of the Empire by the Roman Procurator, 
had any interest for them, any bearing upon their eternal 
interests ? What matter was it to them that he had died 
upon the cross ? They could not conceive that they had 
any connection with it, any concern in it whatever. Yet 
shortly after his death, his friends went abroad in the world 
publishing that event as the wisdom of God and the power 
of God to the salvation of the souls of men. The declara- 
tion to the polished Greeks seemed utter foolishness. That 
there was anything of interest in such a fact, the public 
execution of a miserable Jew, — the idea ! it was utterly 
contemptible, and the men who insisted upon it were re- 
garded as insane fanatics, ' the filth and ofi"scouring of the 
world.' And yet that fact, how has it dilated and connected 
itself with the great cause of human salvation all the world 
over. How little did the world suspect the treasures of 
wisdom and sanctification and redemption which were at the 
first hidden in Jesus Christ, hidden indeed. So is it pre- 
cisely, as the course of events is every year and every day 
more and more plainly showing, — so is it with the cause of 
the liberation of the enslaved. It is proving itself to be 
all-related. It is extending its influence through all classes 



37 

and to all interests among us. It is not a mere political 
matter. It enters and shakes in pieces the mightiest eccle- 
siastical associations. It summons the teachers of religion 
to their duty by thousands. It tries the temper and quality 
of men standing the highest in culture, in position, in office, 
and as they stand the test, they rise or fall. It pleads with 
the unirersal soul of the world, and confuses the councils of 
the nation and breaks the peace of cities. Like the glorious 
gospel of the blessed God which took its small beginning in 
the despised town of Nazareth, and then spread abroad until 
it overthrew the temples and idols of Pagan worship, and 
ascended the throne of the Cesars, and went abroad into 
myriads of hearts, searching, cleansing, and inspiring, so 
this despised cause of Humanity which aims to break in 
pieces the rod of the oppressor and the chains of the op- 
pressed, spreads and acts with a like penetrating power, a 
gospel going forth over all the land, calling out into activity 
whatever of good or evil lies slumbering in the hearts of 
men. As in Christ Jesus, so in this cause, are hid treasures 
of wisdom and sanctification and righteousnes and redemp- 
tion. So I find it to be. Rich, unspeakably rich is it in 
the most precious instruction. To every soul that is in 
earnest in seeking the way of life, it is a light to the feet, a 
lamp to the paths. Here and now it furnishes us an oppor- 
tunity of discerning the wide difference there is between 
knowing the right and doing it, a difference which, as I 
have said, we are prone to overlook to the peril of our im- 
mortal souls. 

How is it that in the particular which I have mentioned 
we strive to impose upon ourselves and upon the world the 

3* 



38 

knowledge of our duty for the discharge of it ? How is it 
that we think to satisfy ourselves with saying that we know 
that it is wrong to buy and sell and hunt our fellow men, 
that we are as much opposed to injustice and inhumanity as 
any one ; and we urge our knowledge on this point as a 
reason why not a word should be spoken to us in behalf of 
justice and mercy, as a reason why every voice of appeal 
and expostulation should be hushed ? We not only do 
nothing ourselves, but we decidedly condemn anybody's 
doing anything. We would fain have universal inaction. 
We would have the whole world content with knowing that 
Slavery is wrong, and with doing nothing. The pre- 
eminent, the egregious self-delusion in this case is, not 
merely that we rest satisfied with knowing the right and 
the wrong of the matter, without any action in conformity 
with our knowledge, but we actually take credit to ourselves, 
we boast that we know and hate the wrong, although our 
knowledge and hatred of it have no power over us to influ- 
ence us to do what we may. <' Don't talk to us, we know, 
we know all about it. You cannot tell us anything.' " If 
•je know what is right, happy are ye if ye do it." Happy 
then, and only then. Before God our knowledge alone will 
-never justify, it will only the more fearfully condemn us. 

How now shall this wide distance between our knowledge 
and our practice be bridged over ? What is needed in order 
that we may do as well as know ? It is not more knowledge 
that is needed. Heaven knows, it has become plain enough 
to the blindest that the slave power is aiming to make abject 
slaves of us all. It is throwing off all the disguises under 
which it was once hid. It is clutching at the whole conti- 



39 

nent for the diffusion of its horrors. It has got the whole 
physical power of the government under which we live 
under its command. It marches with armed men into 
our peaceful communities and tears away its prey at the 
cannon's mouth. It is making the saddest havoc in the 
hearts of men. It insists upon our doing its base work, 
and we know how base it is, and yet we do it. We consent 
that the poor fugitive shall be plunged back again into the 
hell from which he has escaped. This is what we are all 
doing, with all our vaunted knowledge of the right and the 
wrong. 

If this state of things continues much longer, we shall 
lose even what knowledge we have. We shall cease to dis. 
tinguish at all between good and evil. We shall come to 
think that it is not such a very bad thing after all, to hunt 
men and consign them to hopeless misery, that wrong when 
legalised is really quite a respectable, humane, beneficent, 
and really Christian institution. To such blindness and 
perversion some are already doomed. They have lost all 
perception of the right and the true. When the light that 
is within us is thus put out, how great, how awful is the 
darkness ! 

I cannot bear to think that this is to be our fate, that we 
are to be given over to a strong delusion to believe a lie, 
that all the fair promise of this land to which the most 
sacred hopes of mankind have clung, is all to be quenched 
in a worse than midnight gloom. I have shared largely in 
the faith which has so often been expressed upon every new 
outrage upon the rights of man, the faith that it would 
result in good, that it would stir up a new spirit of resist- 



40 

ance, that it would awaken people to the fearful and down- 
ward direction things are taking. I have shared largely in 
this faith, I say, but when I have heard the very persons who 
expressed this faith, — when I have heard them say almost 
in the same breath, < What is the use of troubling oneself, 
it can't be helped.' When I have seen, as we have all seen, 
how one outrage, instead of putting a stop to other outrages, 
has seemed to prepare the way only for some new and more 
impious assault upon the dictates of Humanity, the religion 
of Christ and the law of God, I confess I have had the 
most painful misgivings, and have felt that it is very possible 
that we are descending, past all recovery, in the downward 
way that ends in the utter wreck of civil and religious 
liberty, and in the establishment of as remorseless a des- 
potism as the world ever saw. 

But I cannot entertain this thought long. It is too 
painful. I must still hope. I hope even now that we are 
approaching that point in the history of the great Wrong 
which dishonors and lays waste this glorious land, when to 
the fierce torrent that threatens to overwhelm us, the decree 
shall go forth : Hitherto shalt thou go and no farther, and 
here shall thy proud waves be stayed. And when once 
stayed they will be driven back forever. As yet, our eyes 
are not blinded. We see and know how the case stands. 
The question is still before us. What lack we to become 
doers of the right as well as knowers ? If we know what is 
right happy are we if we do it. 

The one great thing that is needed at the present mo- 
mentous crisis, needed by all men public and private, is — 
Courage. We do not stand bravely up for the right that 



41 

we know, because we are afraid. There comes in one of 
our instincts, the instinct of fear, to paralyze the convic- 
tions of reason and conscience. We dread the opposition 
that we must encounter, the loss we must incur, the inse- 
curity in which we must live. We shrink from being ridi- 
culed and denounced and shunned, from being exposed to 
insult and bloody-minded violence. Appalling as these things 
may be, even to the stout hearted, still it has come to this : 
we must flee and yield and compromise our faith in God 
and the Right, and let Wrong trample us down into the 
dust, or we must take courage, not the courage that arms 
itself with weapons of violence, not military courage, but 
the courage of Christ and his Apostles, the courage of all 
those noble men, the bravest of the brave, who have served 
the cause of Humanity and suffered and died for it, ex- 
posing themselves unarmed to the utmost injury that human 
ferocity could inflict. Yes, such men we must have in pub- 
lic stations ; such men we must be in our private places, men, 
who not only know the right, but know also how to con- 
front the extremest danger for the sake of the Right, men 
of that spirit which I sought to describe last Sunday morn- 
ing, primitive Christians over again, men ready to bear the 
reproach of being fanatical, political, anything but religious, 
willing to be denounced as infidels, atheists, turning the 
world upside down. Some few men of that temper we have, 
God be praised, and may He increase the number. May 
we all, in our private spheres, take heart and be of good 
courage, come what may, and speak boldly when a word 
spoken is a brave deed done, and do all that we can. If 
we can do nothing more, we can do much by strengthening 



42 

and encouraging those, who are willing and able to do more, 
with our cordial concurrence and sympathy. We may not 
be able to lead ; we may not be called upon to take the lead. 
But we can at least follow, we can choose, and the choice 
will test our courage, whether we will follow the multitude 
In doing evil with safety, or the few, who are doing right at 
their peril. 

In doing the right, though the whole world should leave us, 
though all men should turn against us, we are not, we can- 
not be alone. The great cloud of witnesses and martyrs, 
of whom the world was not worthy, encompass us and re- 
ceive us into their immortal fellowship. All the forces of 
Nature, animate and inanimate, are on our side. We are 
in harmony with the light and the air and all the stars of 
Heaven, and with God, the Maker and Upholder of all. Is 
there nothing in [this sublime faith to inspire courage ? 
Will not this suffice to raise us above all fear ? 

God sleeps not, though sleeps humanity, 

Moves he still in fire and cloud ; 
Heaven is not a vast inanity — 

Earth is more than mankind's shroud ! 
God is in our race, though hidden ; 

Peace is mightier far than strife ; 
Earth may yet be made an Eden — 

Heaven be reached in mortal life ! 
Boldly speak, reluctant lisper ! 

Truth's appeal must mount on high, 
Each true word, each feeble whisper 

Once breathed out, can never die ! 



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